Book Description

A Good Dying: Shaping Health Care for the Last Months of Life examines the critical issues of improving the quality of health care for end-of-life patients. You'll gain valuable suggestions and ideas for creating and maintaining policies that pertain to individuals with various diagnoses, family structures, and personal needs. A Good Dying provides methods and examples that will help managers of health care focus on the needs of patients and make their last days as comfortable as possible. Emphasizing the need for further education of health care professionals and the need for additional research, A Good Dying offers possible solutions to the many barriers of improving conditions for the dying. You will be able to directly apply the information in this book to fulfill and understand the needs of dying patients. Specific topics covered include: -- portraying death and dying through art and using examples that show how death can be perceived as either noble or dehumanizing -- emphasizingthe benefits and conditions of life in hospice care -- educating physicians on the topics of pain management and making patients aware of pain relief treatments -- examining challenges to pain management -- evaluating the adequacy and completeness of individual health care -- measuring quality of life at the end of life by examining the physical and emotional pain of the patient, financial and emotional effects on the patient's family, provider continuity, and advanced care planning With contributions from physicians, patients, families, nurses, chaplains, and insurers, the chapters in A Good Dying offer you several different perspectives on strategies and policies needed toenhance the quality of life for the dying. You'll receive innovative ideas, program models, and strategies for evaluating policies designed to help patients, enabling you to offer better patient care. Complete with current data an